A. V. Christie

We scratch at the backyard together through leaf mould, worm casings she kicks off in a fan behind her. I use a stick to dig, to find for her what she’s shown me near the roots, at the edge of a step—sticky slug on the underside of a hosta’s leaf. How complicated she is and how resigned. Between her beak and my outstretched hand, the worm’s writhing. Then the long slick going down. It fills the throat, like all that’s swallowed. Her head chucks it back, for the worm again dark. The hen’s pupil dilates. She wends and follows. Her queries, sighs, low gurgles, the hastening click of her nails on pavement then hungry again into the grass. Grubs are larger than pale yellow larvae I prize from inside chestnuts. These mucousy blind wanderers she eats right from my palm. Nevertheless I am repulsed by my husband’s embrace. I turn now from his thick belly, breasts, his interests. A body I had clambered over, loved. I scrabble, struggle. I cover myself. Another sticky truth dug up that I must re-bury— sorry on hands and knees, hungry and wary.

I was conceived in the cruelest month in whatever spring California could muster. A little rain—with some more likely. And the buckeyes were they yet on the ground? Damn my father’s smooth stone eyes, other prevailing enticements and what Eliot called the

The canals of Mars beseech various oxides, vast dust storms of a dulled red, a daytime warmth that only reaches so far. Let’s call these fissures canals so we’ll think of Venice looking through our telescope as Mars comes this close in this our anniversary year with its thin atmosphere and, to be probed, its extreme cold.